First 100 Days Review with Salah Benamira, Global Portfolio Manager

Unknown buildings, masked faces of strangers who greeted me politely in the hallway. Colleagues who, for a long time, I only met virtually. This experience has certainly been made by numerous employees around the world, people who started a new job during this pandemic.

I am very happy to have found a very strong collegial culture and a great willingness to help at PI: Despite the situation, I was able to quickly become part of the new teams and familiarize myself with the main topics. I also owe this to the openness which the PI employees have shown towards me. Here, I would like to thank everyone who has supported me at the start. I have not been able to celebrate my start at PI yet, but I have only postponed and not forgotten it!

Due to the dramatic changes taking place at PI as well as the unusual incoming order situation, the company is facing exceptional challenges. This realization might be the most important one for new employees starting at PI.

The most important changes were initiated before I started. This means that as a new employee, you are stepping onto a train that has already started moving. Right from the start, one notices that there is a lot to be done. While at the same time, more and more of the initiated changes start to properly work – i.e., the individual building blocks are increasingly ready to be put together.

Despite the situation, which is difficult in parts, it quickly becomes clear to outsiders that PI has the ability and the necessary means to face this transformation successfully. Such a clear entrepreneurial commitment for change is unique and I can thus look ahead positively.
 

Dramatic measures take time and use up a lot of energy, this is normal.

Therefore, it is particularly important to set the right priorities. For me, this means to quickly understand and learn about the success factors that have made PI products great, on the market and at its customers.

In my new interdisciplinary position, I would like to participate in further expanding Global Portfolio Management in order to consolidate the introduced changes: In a first step, all PI activities from the Technology Centers through Product Development to Engineering will be made more transparent. Simply put, this means that Global Portfolio Management will develop into a kind of dashboard for the company, which will also offer support as an additional decision maker when planning the budget.

Global Portfolio Management should not only be seen as a capturing tool: Starting at the early stage of technology development through to the successful product introduction, the coordination of the technology and product roadmaps with the people responsible must be viewed as a core building block of this methodology.
 

Both, in my private and professional life: To be able to define things myself, has always driven me. Therefore, this new position as a Global Portfolio Manager is ideal for me since it is about creating the missing building blocks for the company. A successful exchange with the cross-divisional stakeholders is essential here. This is were I want to put a special focus, and become the personal contact person for the Global Sales & Marketing division as well as the local sites.

This is how the circle can be completed: Important and far-sighted impulses from outside the GRP should be brought onto the agenda of technology development after being evaluated. This is how these suggestions can find their strategic place on the way to product maturity in an early stage, so that PI can maintain an advantage on the market in the future as well.